Dev Log 0
I’m actually making an exciting amount of progess towards my demo and it’s only been a day. I know I’ll plateau when I really get into it, and I’m only in the greybox phase, but I’m immediately infatuated with the malleability of 3d objects in Unity (particulary using ProBuilder).
Design Principles
“Absolutely no AI was used to create assets, write code, write or create content in this game.” “Find the guys who the guys you look up to, look up to” “I will never show what I can imply.” (this applies to diegetic ui and character skin etc.) “I will never scare when I can disturb.” “I will never rush when I can suffocate.”
Inspiration
I’ll start with what’s clearly the most fun and easy part, inspiration. A principle that I choose to follow lies in this Bob Dylan quote:
“…But you can’t just copy somebody. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.”
Basically, nearly everything good is derivative, and that’s not bad. Knowing what you’re building off of makes you more informed as a creative, and makes it considerably easier to implement artistic license.
Scoring
I believe that open source music is too good and unachievable in quality to pass as an option. I will be scoring my game, but I’m going to include music from some famous composers as well. My first thought – even before making the decision to use open source music – was, “Who scored Outlast?” The answer is Samuel Laflamme, a French-Canadian composer for countless popular games, movies, and tv shows. I watched a BTS video of him discussing what the Red Barrels team wanted in terms of scoring, and he mentioned two composers: Krzysztof Penderecki, and Dmitri Shostakovich. These men are amazing composers and fantastic inspiration for what can be done, even from a in world sound design POV. Some of their songs that stood out to me:
- Pendericki
- Partita afor harpsichord
- Polymorphia
- Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima
- Shostakovich
- Symphony No. 1
- Symphony No. 4, Movement I
That being said, they are all contemporary, and thus their music is not opensource. I learned a technique that is almost necessary to employ called “Col Legno Battuto”, or “with the wood struck.” Look it up, it’s odd. I went even farther back and looked into composers of atonal expressionist music and found a few to inspire and directly take from/use:
- The Banshee - Henry Cowell
- Rachmaninov: The Isle of the Dead, Symphonic poem Op. 29
- Anton Webern, Five movements for string quartet, Op. 5
I’ve yet to look into audio engineering yet and am sure it will be insanely hard. Deadspace, Outlast, and Insidious are the two biggest inspirations for ambient sound.
Art Direction
My major sources of inspiration for art are:
- Sinister (incomplete visual information as stimulus)
- Caravaggio (inspired Sinister art team)
- Outlast (for staging, pacing)
- Deadspace (inventive ai, procedural spawns)
Next Steps
I’ve found a slew of videos that give basically direct advice on how to apply design ideas. I found other videos, and few articles/walkthroughs that have absurd information per second ratios. Genuinely I will be watching one 5 minute ProBuilder video for the next 5 days until I have every tool mentioned in hand’s reach. It’s insanely intuitive actually and with hot keys the learning curve becomes a learning plane (pun intended). I’ve also found quite a few blender resources (though I haven’t used it, or them) and am starting to do some budgeting for draw calls, and determining how I will handle ambient occlusion in an Outlast-esque approach.
I don’t know what zones to make because I don’t know what the layout will look like, I don’t know anything about draw calls yet, greyboxing is actually very intuitive and engaging, but it’s certainly not gratifying in a “oh yeah, I’m ready for the next step” type of way. I don’t even know how to do a walkthrough of a greyboxed area to determine whether or not it suffices. I know general room height, character height, and a handful of other things that regretfully don’t make moving forward any less daunting. I am very excited though and will including the resources that make me feel that way below.